Serenity

Hey guys ,

Been a while . Hope you're all doing well .

So , my brother asked me to help him out with his art project . The theme was to use his body somehow as a tool for art . So we decided to make growing tattoos .

I had to track , camera project , model his body ( for geo tracking & projecting ) & the room ...etc . I only had my canon PowerShot to use ( the normal camera I had with me in England ) , so as you can imagine , it didn't shoot the highest quality of videos , hehehe , which was the trickiest part of this whole project . After many failed attempts , we ended up with only two days to shoot & get the job done . Also because the camera was bad , I had to stick relatively big tracking markers on my brother's body .

The hardest part of it all was removing the big tracking markers & putting his skin back on , especially since lighting was constantly changing on his skin while he was moving . To over come this , I had to build the areas that covered the markers , render to texture ( that means projecting my brother's skin with the markers on the geometry ) & remove the tracking markers in PS . Of course I had to do this on a few different frames throughout the shot & blend them together to match the lighting ( one frame just didn't cut it ) .

For tracking , I had to denoise the footage in After Effects , especially on the blue channel . I had to use relatively high settings , otherwise the track would keep jittering , which is why I used big markers in the end . Also , I used big white triangles sticked with normal glue on his back , as other shapes & sizes didn't give good results . I also tricked PFTrack into thinking that the geometry track was actually a camera track ( to get access to the smoothing of the curves & improving the solution options , which is not available for simple geometry tracking/motion tracking ) . Of course I also had to animate my brother's body geometry to go along with his organic movements ( spine bending & such ) . But if you concentrate , you'll still see a bit of sliding .

I used 3DS Max , PFTrack , AE & PS for this project . The tattoos are from the videocopilot's Evolution floursh collection ( but they can easily be done in AE from scratch should you choose to ) . In the end , I used soft light to blend the tattoos with the footage so it would catch the lighting of the environment .

So , without further ado , here it is ( sorry about the quality , I had to compress it a lot to be able to upload it to youtube ) :



Let me know what you think ;)